PORT ANGELES – The Community Paramedicine Program run by the Port Angeles Fire Department is gaining financial support after just one year of existence.
The program is a true example of preventive medicine, where a fire department paramedic was re-assigned to contact patients with a high frequency of emergency response calls, to offer medical prevention assistance.
Port Angeles Fire Chief, Ken Dubuc spoke with us about the concept for the program.
“We wanted to basically start a program that would help those folks in the community who tend to fall through the cracks, people who have turned to 9-1-1 and the hospital emergency department as their primary access to healthcare. Neither of those are the most efficient ways for people to get health care. We wanted to find a way that we could get someone out into the community who could provide good referral services to get people into primary health care providers without having to access 9-1-1 or go to the emergency room.”
Department firefighter and paramedic Dan Montana was selected to fill the position for community medical outreach. Chief Dubuc said that a list of contacts for Montana to contact was developed from within the department. He said that patients that would call 911 frequently made up this list.
Dubuc said it wasn’t long before Montana’s community outreach showed dramatic results.
“It is sort of a retrospective study on patients that Daniel saw we tracked; how often they had called 9-1-1 and how often they had gone to the emergency room in the six months before they saw Daniel. After that initial meeting with community paramedic, the calls to 9-1-1 dropped by 58% and trips to the emergency department dropped by 68% Those are huge numbers. Some of these people have been calling 9-1-1 ten, twenty, thirty, fifty, a hundred times. And some of them have been visiting the emergency department dozens of times and after seeing Daniel in many cases those dropped off to zero.”
Dubuc said that with grants and other financial support from the community, funding for this community paramedic is funded through 2020. Support came in from OMC, Clallam County Behavioral Health, Peninsula Behavioral Health, and the North Olympic Healthcare Network.
The Port Angeles Fire Department currently is looking to hire a firefighter/paramedic to fill the vacancy left by Montana.